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Material Art Fair

Rokni Haerizadeh, Ulrike Müller, Booth A24

Art fair

February 8 – 11, 2018

An image from a newspaper that has elements of collage and paint over it. The image depicts animal-hybrids seemingly dancing in the grass, surrounded by buildings.

Rokni Haerizadeh, Subversive Salami in a Ragged Briefcase, 2013–14. Gesso, water color and ink on printed paper, 11 5/8 x 16 1/2 inches (29.5 x 41.9 cm)

An image from a newspaper that has elements of collage and paint over it. The image depicts animal-hybrids layered upon one another. There is an rabbit face, textured areas that resemble feathers or scales, an anteater head, and others.

Rokni Haerizadeh, Subversive Salami in a Ragged Briefcase, 2013–14. Gesso, water color and ink on printed paper, 11 5/8 x 16 1/2 inches (29.5 x 41.9 cm)

An image from a newspaper that has elements of collage and paint over it. There are partial body parts (legs, arms) that are dressed in black, without heads. They are talking on a city block, and in the background a public transport bus morphs into their scene.

Rokni Haerizadeh, Subversive Salami in a Ragged Briefcase, 2013–14. Gesso, water color and ink on printed paper, 11 5/8 x 16 1/2 inches (29.5 x 41.9 cm)

An abstract composition with a vertical line down the center. On the left is white, on the right is a pale orange. At the top near the center line, we have a teal triangle, at the bottom we see a gray triangle.

Ulrike Müller, Some, 2017. Vitreous enamel on steel, 15 1/2 x 12 inches (39.4 x 30.5 cm)

An abstract composition with a vertical line down the center. On the right half is a white shape on a black background; on the left side is a taupe shape on a beige background. At the top, we see a pale blue triangle.

Ulrike Müller, Some, 2017. Vitreous enamel on steel, 15 1/2 x 12 inches (39.4 x 30.5 cm)

An abstract composition with a central vertical axis. On the left is a red shape on a white background. There is a black triangle near the top, and a beige triangle near the bottom.

Ulrike Müller, Some, 2017. Vitreous enamel on steel, 15 1/2 x 12 inches (39.4 x 30.5 cm)

An abstract composition with a central vertical line. On the left is a dark green semi-circle on a white background, on the left is a pale blue half circle on a dark green background. There is a pink triangle at the top of the axis, and a softer pale blue form near the bottom axis.

Ulrike Müller, Some, 2017. Vitreous enamel on steel, 15 1/2 x 12 inches (39.4 x 30.5 cm)

An abstract composition with a central vertical axis. The shapes are predominantly semi-circles: a black on on the left on a beige background, and a small black semicircle at the bottom of the axis on the right. At the top-right, there is a blue swatch that defines the white background.

Ulrike Müller, Curls, 2017. Vitreous enamel on steel, 15 1/2 x 12 inches (39.4 x 30.5 cm)

Press Release

Material Art Fair, Booth A24

February 8-11, 2018

Callicoon Fine Arts presents works on paper by Rokni Haerizadeh and enamel on steel works by Ulrike Müller for their inaugural appearance in the Material Art Fair, Mexico City.  

Haerizadeh’s paintings foreground social and public gatherings: weddings, festivals, funerals, and protests. The series “Subversive Salami in a Ragged Briefcase” takes protest imagery as its point of departure. Its title comes from a line of an Alan Ginsberg poem; for Haerizadeh, the protestor figures as a salty salami-like body. Faceless, abstracted bodies scrawled with protest slogans populate these works, signaling a turbulent social body rather than an individual. Like exquisite corpses, bodies combine with surreal elements, evoking an imaginary scene that radically transforms the original image of protest. 

In “Some,” Müller translates geometric drawings into vitreous enamel coated plates. She uses a firing technique that denaturalizes concepts of painting as well as the hand of the painter. Composed of touching, blurred and overlaid color planes, these tricky works present unstable fields and sliding signifiers, an effect that is enhanced by the slippery reflectiveness of the enamel medium. The works bring modernist formal terms into the functional realms of enamel’s industrial and ornamental uses, which, along with the feminine and racialized other, have long been excised by modernism’s moralizing purview. Müller’s attachment to these formal terms invites questions about the potential of (not fully) articulated forms. 

Rokni Haerizadeh is a Tehran-born artist based in Dubai. Recent exhibitions include the Liverpool Biennial, UK (2016) and Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2011). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2016); the New Museum, New York (2014); and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2013). Since 2009, Haerizadeh has collaborated with Ramin Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian. Collective exhibitions include The Maids at MACBA, Barcelona (2017) and The Birthday Party at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (2016). His works are in the collections of the Tate Modern and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Ulrike Müller is a painter based in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include mumok, Vienna (2015); and Kunstraum Lakeside, Austria (2014). Recent group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial, New York (2017); Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon at the New Museum, New York (2017); and Invisible Adversaries at Hessel Museum of Art, New York (2016). Müller has been a co-editor of the queer feminist journal LTTR and organized Herstory Inventory, a collaborative project and book published by Dancing Foxes. Her works are in the collections of mumok in Vienna and MoMA in New York.

For additional information contact Photi Giovanis at info@callicoonfinearts.com, or call 212-219-0326

Location and Details: Material Art Fair is located at Frontón México, De La Republic #17, Col. Tabacalera, Del. Cuauhtémoc, Mexico City, C.P. 06030. Thursday, February 8: Preview 12pm-3pm, Public Access 3pm-9pm; Friday, February 9-Saturday, February 10: Public Access 11am-8pm; Sunday, February 11: Public Access 11am-7pm

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